Ron Paul on the Financial Crisis

“Our problems start with the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is a monopoly and it controls interest rates artificially low, causing people to make mistakes. That’s the basic source. But then on top of that in the housing market we had the Community Reinvestment Act which told investors that they had to loan to risky borrowers, and that was the complication.

HUD contributes to this. FDIC contributes to this. It’s called moral hazard. Everything that we have done over here creates moral hazard. That is, we assure people […] we’ll take care of everybody. “Just go out and take the risk.” It’s the opposite of the marketplace. And then they have people come along and say, “See, this is the failure of capitalism”. This has nothing to do with capitalism. This is something that started off as interventionism and as being too involved in the economy for the benefit of special interests, but now it’s being socialized out in the open.

We the taxpayers now own the mortgage companies, the insurance companies, and we’re gonna own a lot more. If our car companies need to be bailed out, believe me, it’s gonna happen, they’re not gonna let all our car companies go broke either.

But this will come to an end. The end of this comes when people reject the dollar. And I think we’re getting awfully close to this.”

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